Beneficial exercise - or not going to the gym (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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1 July

What I seem to have failed to suggest in that earlier posting (although, really, it belonged there) is:

Exercise only does you any good if you're doing it because you want to do it

You can go through all the bench-presses and roiwng-machines in the world, but, if you don't do it with the love for what you are doing, there will be little or no benefit:

You will begrudge going to the gym, because it costs, hurts, makes you sweat, and, even, none of these claimed sexual encounters between gym-coaches and their trainees occur


All of these feed into a resentment at what is soon the chore of fitting in going to this place (where you have paid,or are paying) to do things that you don't enjoy on the pretence, probably no longer on yours, that it is doing - or will do - you some good

That resentment kills any possible benefit that could accrue to you, just as it would if you only had sex to lose how ever many calories the glossy magazines boast intercourse burns up*

These good things are by-products, by-products of doing something where you actually take pleasure in the exercise - if it is from rowing, then it would be from other things than just the mechanical motion replicated by the machine**, such as the people with whom you are rowing, the camaraderie with them before and after and exerting yourself with them, the river or canal where you row (of which, even if your concentration is focused, you will be aware), and, probably, the absurd pain of the hour of day at which you choose to do this

If I am a celebrity wanting to get my figure back after childbirth, unlike a mere mortal who does not have the resources, I will pay someone to urge me on, with psychological motivations picked for me to make what I doing pleasurable, if still a demand on me


I simply think that, forcing oneself to the gym (not least when one's increasingly infrequent or rushed visits are seen as something that one has or ought to do, not something that one really wants to do) is unlikely 'to deliver' what finding something like tennis or table-tennis or walking that one likes might


Which opinions I choose to sum up by suggesting that the spirit gives live, whereas the law kills



End-notes

* As if one can compare a marathon session of sexual pleasure, where your partner and you seamlessly adopt new ways of love-making (and build up a sweat because you are enjoying the intimacy of each other's body), with something perfunctory in the missionary position.

** Which, honestly, even non-stop MTV does not render palatable (or even renders less so).


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